“I said, ‘For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children’”

“I said, For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,’” the psychiatrist Werner Huth said in an interview Thursday. “I was very unhappy about the entire story.” Dr. Huth said he was concerned enough that he set three conditions for treating the priest, Peter Hullermann: that he stay away from young people and alcohol and be supervised by another priest at all times.

Dr. Huth said he issued the warnings  explicit, both written and oral  before the future pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, left Germany for the Vatican in 1982. In 1980, following abuse complaints from parents in Essen that the priest did not deny, Archbishop Ratzinger approved a decision to move the priest to Munich for therapy.

Here is where things start unraveling for the Pope:

The psychiatrist said in an interview he did not have any direct
communications with Archbishop Ratzinger and did not know if the
archbishop knew about his warnings. Though he said he spoke with
several senior church officials, Dr. Huth’s main contact at the time
was a bishop, Heinrich Graf von Soden-Fraunhofen, who died in 2000...

In the minutes taken by the priest in charge of the parish at the
meeting with the parents, he noted that they “would not file charges
under the current circumstances” in order to protect their children.... Spared prosecution after his transgressions in Essen, which according
to the statement released by the diocese he “did not dispute,” Father
Hullermann instead was ordered to undergo therapy with Dr. Huth. The
archdiocese said that order was approved personally by Archbishop
Ratzinger.

So we are asked to believe that, as archbishop, Ratzinger personally approved an order for a priest to be transferred to Munich for therapy, after his archdiocese had been repeatedly and explicitly warned that this priest was a danger to children - but that Ratinger had no idea what that therapy was about, and bears no responsibility at all for the acts of abuse committed then and thereafter by this protected child-rapist.

Yes, it appears that this is what we are being asked to believe.

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